Theodora Karatzas is dark-haired, 3 years old, and so excited with life that she runs everywhere on tiptoe. Today she reaches up, her bare feet arching against the bare oak floor, to help her mother play the smooth black Steinway that sits in their Southwest Portland living room.

Her mother, Jill Timmons, fiddles with the keys. A few bars of "Chopsticks" emerge. But not kid "Chopsticks." Sophisticated, syncopated "Chopsticks". As it might be played by a concert pianist.

After a while, Theo slips off the bench and crawls under the piano to find the spider named Charlotte she thinks has set up housekeeping there. Timmons stretches out to her full, lanky length and lets go with an effortless stream of Liszt.

Timmons found the Steinway in 1986. She was 36 years old and a career pianist, and finally she had the piano of her dreams. In many respects, she has a life to match. She lives in Portland, yet has toured internationally. Her Carnegie Hall concert in 1985 was a success, noted with a glowing review in The New York Times.

When Timmons is not playing, she teaches. For her, performance and teaching are symbiotic. "I can't not teach people," she said. Seven months of the year, she commutes to McMinnville, where she is artist-in-residence and professor in the music department at Linfield College.

This summer, she will record the complete piano works of her one-time teacher, William Bergsma. She greatly admires Bergsma's work, and at Carnegie Hall she played three pieces by the Seattle composer.

Putting pieces by any modern composer on a Carnegie Hall program is a daring act; audiences like more familiar fare. It is also totally within Timmons' character.

"I wanted to do something different," she said. "I wanted to play some thing that was not very traditional. I really went on my gut instinct on what to do with that programn--and it really served me well.

Most of her office in Linfield's Renshaw Hall is taken up with a battered grand piano. One wall, in natural brick, forms a picturesque background for a rangy, red-haired, 42-year old woman with a wide, ready smile and an uninhibited playing style.

Sitting on the piano bench, where she can gesture with impunity, Timmons talks about her art and her background, where she came from and why she is here. The conversation keeps looping back to a strange passion of hers: quantum physics.

Timmons thinks a lot about why people approach music the way they do. Her own method is to seek exotic links from her music to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, the mind-widenimg universe of relativity and the contemplative world of Zen.

"It is such a powerful concept, a powerful notion about what we are," she said of quantum theory. "To be able to affect your reality by your thinking--I believe that, but to have that kind of evidence in the physical world is really exciting."

Book plays role

Her scientific bible is Gödel, Escher, and Bach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that ties music, art and science together in an attempt to explain artificial intelligence. The common thread in the book, as in quantum theory, is paradox. Here's how it might work in music: A composer gives a piece a metrical marking. That's how fast you're supposed to play the piece. But if, like a robot, you play it exactly that way, you will distort what the composer intended.

"I experience that so much and so vividly in music," Timmons said. "The music itself requires a different relativity in terms of time, for it to be correct time." Everything is relative, but the musician must remain in control. "The only area that really addresses this issue," said Timmons, is Zen.

Paradox belongs to Zen, too. Timmons describes Zen as "holding simultaneously two things that don't belong together."

Through Zen, she encourages her students to experience the current moment, to become grounded, more fully present. Then the creator can rise, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the old self.

"Our art form is ephemeral," she explained. "There's no way you can prepare for it and know exactly how it's going to be. You prepare--and then you do it."

It takes more than talent to succeed as a concert pianist. Beyond Timmons' ability, said Patricia Scordato, a Lake Oswego teacher and pianist who is one of Timmons' students, there is intellect. "She knows how to connect to her music, to whatever composer. She has this insatiable hunger to know everything there is to know about the composer and what his intentions are."

Strength in attitude

The passion rubs off on the students. Leaving a lesson, Scordato said, "I feel more musical. I feel better about myself as a musician."

"She always had a special tonal quality," said Nellie Tholen, the doyenne of Portland piano teachers and one of Timmons' first mentors. "She knew how to balance the lines so that the melody was expressive and sang out. She still has that beautiful, beautiful melodic line."

Tholen, too, sees strength in attitude. "That's the whole thing. You can be as talented as you want to, but if you're not happy....You have to be an acrobat physically, but you also have to be a very warm-hearted person to bring out things in a musical phrase."

Young Theodora, who was last seen looking for a spider, is the daughter of Timmons and Steven Karatzas. Timmons and Karatzas met 11 years ago, when Timmons arrived at Linfield. Karatzas, who later became a film production designer, was then chairman of the art department. He died of a heart attack just over a year ago. After his death, Timmons continued to teach, but she played little in public. Her performance schedule is just now starting to pick up again. Karatzas' death left Timmons and Theo in charge of a big house in Southwest Portland, full of bare wood and sunlight. And Timmons' piano.

"My favorite thing to do," she said, looking out through large windows at the wall of trees that is her back yard, "is to get up in the morning really early and not get dressed and make coffee and just spend the whole morning at the piano, with nature nearby."

Steinway goal

Before the Steinway, her piano had been a rebuilt 1885 Sohmer. She had traded up, the way some people do with houses, to afford it. But she wanted a Steinway. Every time Moe's Pianos received another shipment of Steinways, she'd go check it out. She even taveled to New York City to look at Steinways. Then, a few years ago, someone at Moe's called her to come and look at a new shipment of 7-foot grands. He sapiently didn't tell her about the one he knew she'd pick.

"The second I played this piano, I knew," she smiled. "It has an incredibly lyric quality to it." John Steinway, who has since died, happened to be at Moe's when she bought the piano. He signed it in broad felt pen, right on the soundboard.

Last year, after another exhaustive search, Timmons traveled to New York to pick out a 9-foot Steinway for Linfield. After it had had a long rest in the basement auditorium at Melrose Hall, she played a welcome-home concert on it.

"I grew up hearing the piano all the time at home," Timmons said. "My dad's dance band (he still leads Dr. T and His Orchestra) rehearsed at the house, so once a week all these men would come and fill up the living room--noisy and laughing--and then they'd play all this great music. My room was on the other side of the wall. I'd get up in the middle of the night and just listen."

She remembers the very day she decided to play the piano. "My father pulled out the Grieg piano concerto with (Artur) Rubenstein and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with (Eugene) Ormandy conducting. I can remember every detail of the record. I just turned around and told him, 'I've got to play this'--and I was, like, 5! It really struck something in me."

For the Timmons family, music was fun, and important but nothing to be intense about. Well into high school, Timmons didn't even consider music a serious career aoption.

Her father had taught mathematics, and she was interested in science.